Michael Pilgrim, the former editor of the Sunday Express, is taking Express Newspapers to an employment tribunal later this month for alleged breach of contract in a dispute over his salary.

Mr Pilgrim was asked by the Express to leave the paper "by mutual consent" in May after a memo he sent to its chief executive, Richard Desmond, was leaked to the Observer.

He has since been negotiating a payoff with the company.

Lawyers acting for Mr Pilgrim will claim in a tribunal on July 23, that Express Newspapers paid his June salary, then withdrew the money from his bank account.

As he is still employed by Express Newspapers, they will claim it is in breach of contract.

Express sources indicated some weeks ago that Mr Pilgrim may not be entitled to more than the legal minimum payoff of £30,000.

Mr Pilgrim's departure was precipitated by a withering attack that he launched on his proprietor in a memo.

He said in his memo that Mr Desmond had interfered regularly in editorial decisions in order to favour his own commercial interests and those of his friends.

"I have been asked on several occasions to suppress evidence of wrongdoing," he wrote.

"I have been asked to suppress stories for 'commercial reasons' which have not in the slightest benefited the newspaper. I have been under ridiculous pressure to run unjustified stories to settle scores.'"

Mr Pilgrim and other financial journalists on the paper allege that they were asked to suppress one negative story about the financier Alan Shepherd, a friend of Mr Desmond's, and another about Freud Communications.

They claim they were asked to spike a negative story about BSkyB's interactive subsidiary, Open, and that they were asked to run negative stories about Conrad Black, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, who is in a legal dispute with Mr Desmond.

Neither Express newspapers nor Michael Pilgrim was available for comment.